I wrote this in September. I hovered over the ‘post’ button and walked away from it because at the time it felt “too”. Too whiny when we’re watching so much death on our screens, too ripe for misinterpretation, pitying comments or unsolicited advice, too stream of consciousness, too much repeating of my loathing of social media when I obviously need to still use it to promote what work I do. It’s taken me 2.5 months but I post it now with a lot of gentleness for September me, who was buried under a truly shitty health flare, relentless health and financial bureaucracy and a wave of grief for absolutely everything, that threatened to drown me. I hope that if you are hovering over whatever metaphorical ‘post’ button of your own you’ll give yourself the same grace.
There is a nest at the very top of the giant Cheesewood tree in our backyard. The tree itself has many names and I can respect that, as a tree of many names myself. Its exquisite latin name is Pittosporum undulatum, for the undulating edges of its sword-like leaves.
Undulatum. It makes me think of a dancer. The way I have watched my friends and colleagues roll and stretch and reach their bodies, much like the tree does on a windy afternoon like today.
I sit on the back stoop and stare up at the nest and the branches wave like arms in gentle response to the Spring breeze, tugged one way then springing back. The sound of the leaves is like rain, coming in showers.
A dog barks, just once. A bell rings in the distance, I don’t know where from as it is Sunday and none of the schools are open. The sound of a plane hums as it approaches and then fades. Birds call from the Peppercorn tree in the neighbours yard.
There are so many different bird sounds here but this one I can’t quite pick, and then all of a sudden one bird appears on the fenceline, then two. They both stare directly at me like they weren’t expecting to see a small-to-medium sized human squatting on a step in the yard. Just as I was not expecting to see two small-to-medium sized birds staring back at me from the fence.
Deciding I am not of any major concern, one flits to balance precariously on the rotary washing line and pick bits of dog hair trapped in a corner of line by some cobweb. The washing line bounces like a loosely strung instrument as the bird tugs with its curved beak, and I realise it is pulling at the honey-coloured dog hair our neighbour had been brushing out in the street earlier.
We had waved hello and my partner asked her little one, who was standing next to the dog, if they were creating clouds. “Just helping the birds build their nests”, our neighbour replied on behalf of her babe who was grinning silently up at us, and we’d all laughed. But here they were.
I realise of course that it really is nesting season. The bird’s companion flits directly overhead to a higher branch on the Mock-Orange1 with a call, perhaps a little more concerned than its mate at being in proximity with a potential predator. Agitated, it calls again, more insistently, and they both fly off together into safer territory.
Between the Peppercorn tree and the outstretched arms of the native daphne2 is a valley of azure blue sky. Puffy white clouds drift across the space between the trees, connecting the two yards. Yesterday they had been the shirred type that the cloud appreciation society (it feels nice to know there is a cloud appreciation society) calls Undulatus. Resembling ripples on a sandy beach. “a reminder, to any who might forget, that the atmosphere around us is just as much of an ocean as the sea below.”3
On the other side of the sweet Pittosphorum4 the Mulberry branches have grown far too tall. I’m reluctant to cut them down now that Spring is here. The branches will provide much needed shade once Summer is upon us and the sun beats upon the uninsulated back add-on. Cutting down the upper branches may have to wait for next Autumn when we desperately need more light and warmth in the home I now find myself thinking of as a living breathing thing. The witches cottage. We pat the walls and promise to take care of it as it takes care of us.
It occurs to me that this Springtime, I would like to spend far more time looking up at that tree, and off into the blue sky at scudding Undulatus clouds than with my face a rulers length from my phone screen. Certainly it would be more productive than watching while capitalism thrashes like a drowning man, clinging to humanity.
I always felt it would be impossible to remove myself entirely, given my self-employment and reliance on social media to stay connected with my industry. Lately I’ve felt the ache of grief in feeling my own inevitable disappearance. Not out of any need to be remembered, or acknowledged. I’ve had my time for that and it has long been time for other artists to be at the forefront.
But I love performing. I love creating. I love teaching. I love people, despite the ways we all despair at humanity sometimes.
But all the ways in which I was once connected have been whittled back, one at a time as my health has worsened. My life is infinitely quieter now. No weekly dance classes to teach, no groups of students to guide through costume planning and choreography, no end of term showcases, no hustling for gigs, no after-show drinks, no easy excuses to hang-out. There’s nothing easy about being the one who has to ask if everyone would be ok with doing a RAT and could we sit outside and I’m so sorry I have to cancel my body is flaring.
…
I’ve been in the process of creating a new act and it has been putting such immense pressure on my body it makes me wonder if it’s time to let go. I love my art but I don’t want to destroy myself for it. I know however, I would be rudderless without it.
The grief of losing performance art completely, my lighthouse, the wind and the sail…it might be just too much for this aching heart to bear when so much else is already in turmoil. I don’t know…
There are days when I let myself sink into bitterness like a cold bath. But today is for turning my face upward and believing everything will get better.
In its own way.
I am deeply grateful for what I do have.
I think, I hope, I feel, that as I get better at pacing and rest, I get better at practicing what I’ve preached to my students.
Modelling self-patience, self-kindness, clear-eyed and realistic expectations, rest, the joy of process. There really is joy to be found in process but finding it is the antithesis of everything yelled at us from every corner of popular culture.
I have a small group of excellent solo mentees. I’m offered gigs by producers who know and trust my work, a little filmed teaching, an outside eye contract here, some fan repair work there. I have a home, a partner, friends, and a community outside my door waiting to be nurtured if I just had the energy and perhaps more importantly, the guts to.
As anyone knows who has gone through the throws of a major life shift that is mostly out of their hands, there is a long period of figuring out what it all means. My POTS, ME/CFS and the rest of the growing collection of conditions was triggered by two rounds of Covid I caught at work. There’s grief enough in that alone.
For me this is coupled with the figuring out of why it feels so incredibly lonely sometimes, and what kind of life have I built if everything I love can be pulled away so quickly, and why everyone is acting like Covid never happened while more newly disabled join the ranks every day, and was I masking a deep social awkwardness with an extra glass of champers all that time?(probably yes)
Was I always the “organiser” in projects, shows, social justice because my only way of connecting with people was to be useful? Is it an inadvertent side-effect of feeling so passionate about so many plans and projects that I didn’t leave room to practice the skills of reaching out to others for no other reason than, “I would like to be in your presence.”?
Or is it just impossible to reach out when reaching out is another thing to do which takes energy while existing in a body that now barely has the energy to meet its own basic needs each day.
The result either way if I’m not careful is a lean in to not-so-social media. Which I’ve desperately wanted to extricate myself from for years. Now perhaps is the golden opportunity.
I have no-one to impress and nothing to prove. I don’t need to “stay relevant” & arguably none of us really ever did. I don’t know whether the pursuit of relevancy is more Sisyphean or Promethean given the anguish it causes so many in the industry. The moment you stop pushing the boulder it will roll to the bottom of the hill though, so maybe it’s only worth pushing if you like heavy lifting and feel invigorated by the uphill boulder rolling community.
In any case I could relentlessly create ‘content’, or simply create my art, and yet either way there is no doubt I will be forgotten by many, and one day…all, because we simply cannot be on everyones minds forever. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think it’s a joy if we let that knowledge liberate us.
We are completely insignificant, and therefore we are so incredibly important.
We are incredibly important, and utterly insignificant.
We could be the biggest whale in the ocean and yet the whale is a speck compared with the scale of the earth, moon and stars. One day the whale will die and the ocean will dry up and the sun will swallow the earth, and other planets in the far reaches of our solar system may come alive for a moment as Venus and Mars may have long before we did.
It’s a miracle of chance and timing that the gases and elements combining in just the right ways, and just the right amount of sun and a magnetic field that protects our atmosphere in just the right way, and a balance of ozone effect that keeps the planet warm enough for life but not so warm to turn it into a hellscape.
Scientists have been learning from each other from the moment they figured out we could mark the sunrise across ridges and shadows across landscapes and track the movement of stars across the sky. Healers have been learning from one another since we figured out how to use herbs, and create splints.
Artists have been learning how to connect and communicate and express and inspire since the first people drew on rock, and created instruments out of reeds and bones, and shared stories, and felt a beat they needed to move to. What are we dancing to if not the music of the universe? We’ve been adding to that collective knowledge ever since in a long lineage.
So I believe in the radical possibilities of our art to connect us. But all of this does put the idea of relevancy & the “to do” list in perspective.
I also believe that you do not have to be “the best” at anything. I believe in your right, my right, to be mediocre in all things but kindness (not niceness5) and curiosity. That your worth as a creature on this earth is inherent, like all living things.
While we drag our feet through the sludge of “optimisation” and “traction” and “productivity” somewhere outside right this moment there is a caterpillar slowly inching its way up a leaf towards the sunlit edge where it will munch away for the final time before it builds it’s cocoon….
I don’t want to be uninformed I just don’t want to be so over-informed there’s no room left for doing anything about that information. Our brains are not designed for it and the powers that design everything we consume know it. In fact those who strategise for fascism know this too, and no I’m not being dramatic. Keeping people overwhelmed is a very old tactic and it’s never been easier to achieve.
It is physically impossible to be on top of every piece of news. While some days I understand the feeling of “fuck you for not caring enough about my thing” because I too get so frustrated when nobody seems to act even when I know they care. I shout my pleas into the empty void of Instagram, but how can I possibly expect everyone to hear it when it relies on an algorithm showing it to you? What are you supposed to do with the information even if you hear the plea? (I mean, wearing a mask indoors would be a start but I digress).
Phone trees6 gave us clear parameters for who calls who in an emergency. They formed part of a community in action.
Social media removed that direct clarity the moment people started using Facebook to send out invites for events and realised with heartbreak that nobody was coming to their party because somehow it didn’t feel like the invitation was really personally intended for them.
We’ve been breaking apart the idea of community since Facebook convinced us community was hundreds of thousands of people with no plan, roles or collective motivation, endlessly arguing in the comments and feeling smug when we nail a good “gotcha”.
There has never been a more important time to figure out how to connect, how to act, how to rest, and how to use our energy and attention wisely than right now. Do I have every answer? Am I getting it perfectly right myself? Absolutely not.
This isn’t a lecture it’s a self-check.
I realise we have all been so isolated by the design of social media twisting life and connection and care, into buying more shit and gamifecation of connection, and feeling paralysed into doing nothing more than re-sharing relentless “fuck you if you don’t’s” because it creates the illusion of action, even though our nervous systems keep screaming at us that it is not enough.
Because it isn’t.
Ok, enough.
I look at the grass waving in the breeze. We’ve let it grow long in the absence of enough time and energy to get the push mower out, and it now needs a whipper-snipper. Until that future whipper-snipper day, it is a soft, green ocean of rippling strands. I watch the wind send waves across this green sea as it would the salty water near the bird sanctuary where we rugged up to go watch the Aurora over a year ago.
Birds argue nearby. I watch the Mulberry tree branches bob, half in light, half in shade, the first green fruits beginning to grow on long limbs.
I think of my neighbour with the dog and how I have thought for nine months about inviting her over. Long enough to create a human. She has one of her own and I wonder what her day to day is like.
My immediate thought is perhaps she might need help, but maybe she doesn’t. Maybe I can stop thinking I need to be useful and all that would really be necessary is to welcome her over, into a house that has washing on the clothes horse in the living room, clutter in the corners and an endless to do list.
I look at the nest at the top of the Victorian box7 swaying gently despite the rushing of the wind. The wind which has torn the ripe limes from a tree on the street which will sit in piles to rot if left unclaimed.
Old habits die hard I guess? A margarita is a good excuse as any to have a neighbour over.
Another name for the Pittosphorum Undulatum
Another name for the Pittosphorum Undulatum
https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/cloud-library/undulatus/
Another name for the Pittosphorum Undulatum
Niceness, pleasantness, avoiding conflict has been confused far too often with true kindness.
My partner, who is older than I am, read this this morning and asked me “What’s a phone tree?”. To which I shrivelled into dust, floated outside into my grave and pulled the coffin lid shut.
A phone tree is a plan for who calls who in an emergency or simply to inform everyone of something important before a group text was possible. One person calls two or more other people, each of those people calls two or more and so on until everyone is informed. The idea was to share information quickly as possible. It was used a lot by parents (mothers) when millennials were in school, or within local neighbourhood communities. If anyone has seen “Practical Magic” they’ll know the iconic phone tree scene. An informal phone tree structure may exist within groups of friends and family already where it doesn’t need to be explicitly written down for you to know who calls who. I used to know that simply by calling my mum I could inform the whole extended family of whatever piece of news I wanted to share.
Another name for the Pittosphorum Undulatum
Amazing read 👏🏼